Have you ever walked outside, seen something beautiful, and gotten an urge? Maybe that feeling is translated in my head as an urge. More likely, my appreciation of beautiful light, reflecting from or being transmitted through something I see every day, is short-circuited and comes to my attention as an urge. Is this familiar to anyone?

This is what inspired me today:

Fig Leaf Photo

Although many of you probably don’t have fig trees in your  back yards, I’m sure that you have Maples, or Cacti or a garden or something that catches the light at certain times of the day.

The spot of light that illuminated this new fig leaf enabled me to see it with great definition. Here is a detail of the above photo:

Photograph – Fig Leaf

That this level of detail was present throughout the sunlit part of the leaf just amazed me. I imagined it as a view from space to a science fiction city, but also thought how utterly interesting it was that I was looking at a biochemical production plant.

What comes after the urge?

Ok, so it’s beautiful. I could show the photograph to people (just as I did above), they could ooh and ah, and also think it was beautiful, or I could bring them outside to show them the actual leaf (if the lighting was still the same)… Somehow that doesn’t seem enough for me.

Perhaps I’m giving away some deep psychological flaw of mine when I say, “Appreciation is not enough. I want to recreate this scene myself.”  There would be nothing better than having the ability to draw each and every vein, color the areas in between and saying, “I did this.”  Nowadays someone who doesn’t understand ‘the urge’ might say, “Why bother? Don’t they have cameras for that?”

I thing they’re right, essentially. A beautiful photograph of a leaf can be as much a work of art as a painting or drawing. The photographer must decide upon the framing, depth of field, exposure and other factors that affect the final outcome. But I would venture to say that even a photographer has not satisfied the urge after just taking a photo. The hand of the artist must still be applied in presenting the final image.

Getting back to the leaf…

I realize that I could not possibly recreate in a sketch the scene that inspired my urge. But I could transmute the scene, filter it through myself, and arrive at a visual response to satisfy my urge. ‘Scratch my itch,’ so to speak.

Today’s experiment:

The two most striking elements of the fig leaf were: 1) the sun light; 2) the detail of the veins.

The first step in my sketch was to draw the network of veins. I used latex resist to to this. I’ve got to find a better way to do this than using chop sticks and tooth picks. But, I did the best I could and was reasonably happy with the results.

I thought, at first, that I would experiment with my green pigments, but the prospect of blending two colors together appealed to me more. There was the possibility that I could get interesting, unintended patterns and other surprises that watercolor painting sometimes provides.

After the ‘veins’ dried. I used my lemon yellow to color the top half of the paper and Peacock blue (Holbein) for the bottom half. I got a reasonable green color, but made sure that I did not obliterate all the yellow.

I glazed several times, alternating different blues (Phthalo blue, Prussian blue, for example) with the lemon yellow.

When I was satisfied with the coloring of the leaf, I used Shadow Green (Holbein) between the edges of the leaf and the edges of the paper.

Fig Leaf Sketch
9″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

Conclusion:

I satisfied my urge to create something that was mine alone. Not as good as the original, but…. I did this.